Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Another Obama nuclear coverup

It's been less than a week since I reported that Barack Hussein Obama covered up a shipment of missile components from North Korea to Iran during the P 5+1 nuclear talks. Now, it turns out that wasn't the only thing Obama was covering up. Eli Lake reports that Obama has known for years that Iran is three months from breakout. And he never told anyone.

Speaking to reporters and editors at our Washington bureau on Monday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged that
the U.S. has assessed for several years that Iran has been two to three
months away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear
weapon. When asked how long the administration has held this assessment,
Moniz said: "Oh quite some time." He added: "They are now, they are
right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their
roughly 19,000. Plus all the . . . . R&D work. If you put that
together it's very, very little time to go forward. That's the 2-3
months."

Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, confirmed to me Monday that the two-to-three-month
estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.

Speaking to reporters and editors at our Washington bureau on Monday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz acknowledged that
the U.S. has assessed for several years that Iran has been two to three
months away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear
weapon. When asked how long the administration has held this assessment,
Moniz said: "Oh quite some time."

He added: "They are now, they are
right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their
roughly 19,000. Plus all the . . . . R&D work. If you put that
together it's very, very little time to go forward. That's the 2-3
months."

Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, confirmed to me Monday that the two-to-three-month
estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.

On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian
breakout with that of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who
at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability.
Obama told the
Associated Press, "Our assessment continues to be a year or more away.
And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than
the estimates of Israeli intelligence services."

Ben Caspit, an Israeli journalist and columnist for Al-Monitor, reported last year that Israel's breakout estimate was also two to three months away.

...

David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the
Institute for Science and International Security, told me administration
officials appeared to be intentionally unspecific in 2013, when the
talking points used the 12-months-plus timeline. "They weren't clear at
all about what this one-year estimate meant, but people like me who said
let's break it down to the constituent pieces in terms of time to build
a bomb were rebuffed," he said. Albright's group released its own
breakout timetable that
focused solely on the production of highly enriched uranium, not the
weapon itself. It concluded Iran was potentially less than a month away.

2 Comments:

It will slowly be revealed that Iran's been a nuclear state since shortly before the 2012 election and that Obama's known it all along and that all of this is theater. They reached their detente years ago with the understanding that if Iran coordinated its announcement of finally getting The Bomb with the White House that Obama would unwind all the sanctions and give them everything they want. The key obstacle now, one could imagine is how Obama looks at his own political advantage by throwing Hillary Clinton under the bus over this. Does he derail her candidacy for someone he's handpicked to succeed him, or does he persist with the fiction as it is now because he no longer cares or worries what happens. Follow the money. With 10's of billions of dollars flowing in to Iran now, it can't be impossible that a billion here or there in baksheesh has found its way into an Obama account somewhere on earth.

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I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com